


tell sad stories of the death of kings

by Sybill



Category: Chess (Board Game)
Genre: Coming of Age, F/F, Genderswap, M/M, War is hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 01:01:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8124517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sybill/pseuds/Sybill
Summary: Alina is the King, and there has never been any doubt that she will do what she must.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reishiin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reishiin/gifts).



> Dear Reishiin, 
> 
> This was initially supposed to be a treat last Yuletide, but has taken me longer than I intended to finish. ;) I hope you enjoy it!

On Alina’s wedding day, her mother twines frost-flowers in her hair and passes her a handkerchief, stiff with embroidery. “I cried too,” she says, meeting Alina’s eyes in the mirror. 

Alina is eighteen, and not ready to be a bride. But the Western Lands are restless, their warriors even now skulking in the mountain passes; it has been sixteen years since her father fell, and if there is to be another Game, her kingdom will need a defender. Alina is young and inexperienced, and the Game cannot be played alone.

“At least you knew him,” she says, clutching the handkerchief in her hands.

Her bride is the foremost sorceress in the kingdom. When she makes her vows to Alina under the soaring arches of the cathedral, her power will bind to that of the land, and she will be the Queen Defender, ready to face anything the Western Lands can bring.

Alina met her yesterday. 

“Love can grow,” her mother says, gently tucking a curl behind Alina’s ear. “You have a lifetime to learn to know her.”

“Yes,” Alina says, and does not point out that lifetimes can be short.

In the cathedral, Nataliya is a tall fierce woman with a crown of golden hair and piercing eyes. She looks proud and strong, even kneeling at Alina’s feet, and when Alina raises her, she thinks of that strength protecting the kingdom, and finds a small smile.

She is the King, and there has never been any doubt that she will do what she must.

~

The Game begins a fortnight later.

It starts, as Games always do, with the movement of far-off, anonymous border patrols, the cautious opening salvos that will turn deadly soon. Alina stands in her study, staring down at her wilting bridal bouquet in its ceremonial vase; the despatch in her hand hangs limply at her side. Another patrol lost in a useless, pointless struggle for a pockmarked stretch of mountain. 

Nataliya’s apprentice Olha, a weedy girl who seems almost to fade into the woodwork, asks if she should fetch more water for the flowers. Alina waves a hand; permissive or dismissive, she hardly knows. It matters not. All things die.

(If the Game is lost, she will fall. It is the way.)

Nataliya sweeps into the room, her presence as formidable as the arsenal belted around her waist. “My king,” she says, inclining her head, then raising Alina’s hands to her lips to kiss them softly. 

Alina thinks she could have come to love her, perhaps, if they had more time. But she knows from the battle braids Nataliya wears, and the steel in her eyes, that time has run out.

“My queen,” she says.

The next day, she stands on the battlements and lifts her hand in a royal farewell as her bride sweeps over the drawbridge, the thunder of her cavalry at her back. 

Her ceremonial robes hang heavy on her shoulders. She remembers that morning, when she stood in her sleeping shift in her dressing room, not yet ready to face the cheerful bustle of her ladies-in-waiting. Nataliya, already dressed, her sword swinging at her side, had smiled at her; Alina had stood on tiptoe to kiss her, dislodging her braided crown.

~

It is the duty of the Queen to ride to battle. It is the duty of the King to stay safe in her castle.

Alina does not chafe at her role; she has been preparing for it all her life. The King holds the power of the land in their soul, tied together irrevocably. If she falls in the Game, the power will pass to her cousin Hanna, who will learn to be King in her turn. Yet a little of her land’s power will ebb away during the transfer, flowing to the Western Lands; Hanna’s Game, when it comes, will be more difficult for Alina’s loss.

“Do you ever dream of a world without the Game?” she asks Olha one afternoon, as they walk in the garden.

Olha looks surprised. “Such a world would not be ours,” she says, in a lilt not unpleasing to the ear.

She has been left behind to protect Alina, and perhaps to be Hanna’s bride in turn, if the Game goes ill. Looking at her, Alina thinks Hanna will not be unhappy; she has not asked Hanna what she seeks in a lover – that might be appropriate for girls of an age, but not when one of the girls is a King – but she thinks little fault could be found in Olha’s tall comeliness, the curve of her chin and the readiness of her smile.

“In such a world, you could study without interruption,” Alina says. “My wife the Queen would be here with us to continue your instruction, not risking her life in the Western Lands.”

Olha makes the gesture of acceptance. “It is an honor to serve.”

In a world without the Game, Alina’s father, falling, would not have left her mother severed from queenship, forever alone and bereft of even her sorcery. In a world without the Game, Alina could have chosen her own Queen, could have married in love triumphant, not searching for a tendril of love hoped-for. In a world without the Game, the despatches would not keep coming, telling of a knight fallen, a bishop struck down, the loss of countless unnamed subjects. 

“It is a requirement to serve,” she says, turning away. “There is honor in serving well, I grant it; but I would that there was no requirement, and other ways to earn honor.”

Olha does not respond. Alina can smell her perfume, something soft and roselike. 

“I try not to dream of what could be,” Olha finally says. “There is heart’s ache enough in this world.”

This Alina knows.

~

“Are you wise, my dear?”

Alina is looking out the turret window at the far-off mountain where Nataliya is – or was, when she wrote the despatch that now hangs limp from Alina’s fingers. She defeated a knight in single combat yesterday; the enemy grows weak. Yet Alina knows that the Game can turn in an instant, and her own kingdom is bled white to supply the front lines.

Her mother, receiving no answer, comes closer. “You walk with her every day. People will talk.”

Alina’s bride, whom she barely knows, is risking her life in the mountains. Alina is penned up in a castle, far from the front lines, constrained to protect herself at all costs, hemmed in on all sides. Can she be blamed for clutching at anything that gives her a moment’s breath, a second’s chance to see the beauty in the cold bleakness of the winter sky?

“I am the King,” she says, leaning her aching head against the frosty windowpane. “Let them talk.”

There is nothing – can be nothing – between her and Olha. She is the King. She does not know whether to lust after another woman would harm the bond that her Queen has with the land, but she will not risk her kingdom for a tumble. Nataliya is her wife; Olha cannot be.

“Love can come unbidden,” her mother says, setting a hand on her shoulder. “Duty –”

“Do not speak to me of duty.”

She wonders if Nataliya ever thinks of her, or if she thinks only of her own duty, never more than one step, one day, one move ahead.

“I beg Your Majesty’s pardon,” her mother says.

Alina closes her eyes against the warm prick of betraying tears.

~

Olha goes to the front lines a week later. She is one of the last; there are few left to send.

“I have decided,” she says before she goes, standing silhouetted against the grey of the sky, “that it is not only a requirement to serve, nor only an honor.”

Nataliya’s despatch that morning was curt, harried. Alina could feel the exhaustion behind the terse phrases. She, chafing so at the Game – how small does she feel now, far from the battle, while Nataliya and so many others are in peril every day?

“It is a joy,” Olha says, and leaves her.

~

When her own brittle safety collapses, Alina almost feels relieved.

Not relieved to escape a besieged castle in the dead of night, fleeing with the few personal guards not covering her escape; not relieved to limp one step ahead of pursuit, flinching at every noise; not relieved to wake every morning faintly surprised to not have been ambushed during the night. 

But her enforced inaction has come to an end.

Alina rides to exhaustion, hides in haylofts, eats whatever she can find, is dirty and afraid. Twice she thinks she is done for; the first time they escape by letting themselves be washed away down a stream, and the second Nataliya rides to their rescue, sweeping in with fire and sword.

“You came for me,” she says, resting her head on Nataliya’s shoulder.

Nataliya has spell-lash scars on her arms, and one long white one across her cheek. She still looks fierce and glorious, not dingy and bedraggled like Alina, but there is a spare exhaustion behind the proud uprightness of her body. “Of course I came, my King,” she says.

Alina knows that if she falls, Nataliya’s Queenship passes with her; Nataliya would be like Alina’s mother, severed from her sorcery and able only to train the survivors of this Game for the next. So it was both duty and self-interest that brought her thundering in from the Western Lands, riding like the wind on the wings of magic.

(And yet Alina hopes there was something more.)

She tilts her head up to claim a kiss, as around them soldiers cough self-consciously and turn away. For a moment they are not King and Queen, but simply two women, holding each other against the cold. 

“I cannot stay,” Nataliya says softly, when the kiss ends. 

“Be safe,” Alina demands, though it is a promise she fears Nataliya may be powerless to keep.

~

In another universe, Nataliya pins the King of the Western Lands in a mountain ravine, and the Game is won. 

Alina returns to her ruined castle, and kisses Nataliya amidst the rubble. 

Together they rebuild the shattered cities, train a new generation of knights, and consecrate new bishops. Olha finishes her studies and becomes a sorceress in her own right; she stands godmother to Alina and Nataliya’s first child, along with Hanna. A year later she and Hanna marry, drawn together by love and not by the Game. 

Alina smiles regally at them, watching her wife dandle their daughter on her knee. She no longer remembers the walks in the garden, during the dark days. Her life has blossomed; perhaps there will be no Game until her daughter’s time, and though she hates the thought that her daughter will eventually have to face the darkness in her turn, she will do all she can to prepare her. 

She had made that promise when Oksana was two weeks old, gazing into her cradle with blurry eyes. “She will be strong and strategic and fierce,” she had told Nataliya, with all the force she had learned in the long ten months of the Game. 

“How could she be otherwise, with you as a mother?” Nataliya had asked, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

Alina had not been deterred by affectionate flattery, as pleasing as it might be. “Strategy will be as familiar to her as breathing.”

(Oksana will not flee, powerless, waiting for despatches to tell her if her wife lives, if her own life will soon be forfeit. Oksana will not watch her people be mowed down, her castles and cities destroyed. Oksana will not be eighteen, pushed perforce into a Game before her time.)

“Perhaps we can wait to teach her strategy until she learns how to sit up,” Nataliya had offered. “Or even until she learns to talk.” 

Alina had sighed, but allowed herself to be drawn into a kiss nonetheless.

Now, watching Hanna laugh as Olha twirls her on the dance floor, watching Nataliya toss Oksana in the air, her heart overflows.

~

In another universe, Nataliya is cornered by a knight and a bishop; she defeats one, but is overcome by the other.

Alina receives the despatch while hiding in a swamp, the muddy waters sucking at her ankles. There is no time for tears.

Two weeks later, the Game is over.

Hanna becomes King. She does not marry Olha; Olha fell deep in enemy territory, five days before Alina. She marries a half-trained apprentice from the South instead, and begins to prepare for her own Game. There will be a breathing space, but she knows not for how long.

Alina’s mother buries her daughter, and curses the Game through her sobs.

~

In this universe, Nataliya and the Queen of the Western Lands fight a sorcerer’s battle that lasts for two days, lighting the skies with the force and splendor of its fury.

Alina, temporarily safe in a small village after her last remaining bishop defended her by defeating a marauding band of knights, stands in a cornfield and watches the fireworks. Her heart beats too quickly, lurching like a drunken reveler within her too-delicate frame. She is no strong warrior like her wife; she can only try to protect herself and keep the Kingship from faltering. And she will do that with all her strength until Game’s end – however it ends.

On the third day, the despatch comes.

They fell together, it says in a hurried scrawl. There was a crater in the battlefield; Nataliya lived for an hour, her body broken, but an anonymous enemy soldier was the first to reach her, and she fell.

Without a Queen on either side, the Game could move quickly. Or it could drag on for years, both kingdoms becoming ever more broken, ever more impoverished, ever more fragmented. It is impossible to know.

Alina grieves for Nataliya, but she cannot grieve long. She pores over despatches and talks strategy with every warrior she meets, now that her Queen can no longer lead the charge. Over the next two months she learns more strategy than she learned in the previous sixteen years; the Game has a way of concentrating the mind, and its bloody lessons teach more than any tome or tutor ever could.

She cannot hide and flee any longer. When her forces marshal a push into the Western Lands, she goes with them. They are few now; but so are the armies of the West.

Behind the front lines, protected as much as possible yet ever in danger, she directs her forces against the enemy King and his remaining bishop. She holds the broken bodies of her warriors in her arms; she delivers the coup de grâce twice, and is blessed for the mercy. Kings cannot shrink from their duty, even if that duty is hard.

Time passes, day after bloody day.

Ten months after her Game began, Alina stands on the battlefield where her Queen fell, and stares across its spell-pocked wasteland to where Vladyslav stands, tall and proud. He is thirty years older than she is, and her father fell in his last Game.

“We meet at last,” he says.

Although they are separated by the crater where Nataliya fell, his voice carries as if he is standing only a few feet from her. Perhaps it is a legacy of the sorcery done that day; it makes Alina shiver, as if she could see a ghostly Nataliya standing in front of her, hand outstretched, her spell-working flying from her fingers.

“Ill-met, here where so many fell,” she says, lifting her own chin in defiance.

He laughs. It is a sound that chills Alina’s bones. “My love died here. You cannot hate it more than I.”

Neither of them will venture into the crater. Not from sentiment, though Alina must keep staring at Vladyslav, to avoid her imagination from conjuring Nataliya’s phantasm in the thick summer air. No, it is cold hard self-preservation; to venture into the crater, to lose the advantage of the high ground, would mean certain death as the aggressor came within range of the defender. 

“It is a stalemate, then,” she says. “We are the only ones left.”

There are no more warriors. No more bishops, no more knights, no more Queens. The castles lie in ruins. Only she, and he, and their ruined kingdoms, destroyed by the Game. 

Vladyslav lifts a haughty shoulder. Alina thinks it is a begrudged agreement.

If their world was different, she could have taken a leap into the unknown. She could have taken this stalemate, this un-ending, and used it to propose a radical transformation in both their lives; she could have offered an end to the Game. Either through diplomatic negotiation of the Borderlands, a half-loaf for each but the beginning of peace, or through a more permanent solution. Alina has married without love once – she would not flinch at doing so again, even to a King with blood on his hands, if it meant the end of the Game.

But if their world was different, there would not be the Game in the first place.

“Stalemate,” he says, and she fancies she hears the weariness in his voice. Perhaps it is just her imagination; or perhaps he is just a man, and as tired as she. “Do you thus agree, King of the Eastern Lands?”

If she speaks the ritual agreement, they both return to their broken kingdoms to rebuild, and in five years the Game will start again. Hardly enough time to train new knights, consecrate new bishops, build new castles and cities. Alina will marry again, to whichever trainee sorcerer is the most powerful, and hope they will be more fortunate than Nataliya. And then the bloodshed will start anew.

She is so tired. Her scars throb.

“Unless you have some sorcery up your sleeve,” Vladyslav says, “shall we end this?”

Alina opens her mouth to speak the words.

And feels her spine stiffen in shock, as something in her kingdom slots into place.

“No,” she hears herself say, her voice flat, “I do not agree to stalemate.”

He frowns. “I have disposed of your bishops, your knights, your castles, your Queen.”

But kingdoms do not belong only to the powerful, or to those who are prepared for responsibility. Alina, an eighteen-year-old King pushed into the Game before she was ready, has found herself forced to grow to meet its demands. She is now fully a King, not only in name.

And those who might have been called pawns have grown with her.

Vladyslav has not sensed it yet, but in the throne room of his deserted castle, one of those erstwhile pawns sits on his throne, waiting for the land – and through it Alina – to recognize her presence.

“You have conquered Nataliya,” she says, refusing to let her voice quiver at the name, “but you have not conquered my Queen. Here I stand, and here I name her Olha, Queen Defender; she sits on your throne, and her power comes from your land as well as mine.”

Vladyslav’s face suffuses with rage, as he feels the power of his kingdom shift with the ritual words. 

Alina cannot imagine her own feelings if they stood in her land, and an apprentice sorcerer of Vladyslav’s had snuck into her own destroyed throne room, to take some of the power of her kingdom and be claimed triumphantly as Vladyslav’s Queen.

Perhaps it is not merely rage that fills Vladyslav’s face. Perhaps it is fear, or agony.

“For me,” she says, and hears the exhaustion in her voice, “I am sorry, Vladyslav.”

He does not answer immediately. He sits on the ground instead, folding down gracefully. Then he says, softly, “This damn Game.”

Alina sits on the edge of the crater, letting her legs dangle into it. She will wait with him, until the end. She wonders if he waited with her father, or if he was even there. It is considered bad luck for a King succeeding a defeated King to know the details of their final Game; to this day Alina does not know exactly how her father fell. 

“At least I will be with Ihor,” he says. 

Alina does not know what she believes about the afterlife. If it exists, she hopes devoutly that there are no Games in it.

“You loved him,” she says, not making it a question.

He folds his hands in his lap. The crater is not too large; they can easily meet each other’s eyes across it. “Yes.”

“Tell me about him.”

He is quiet, staring at his hands. 

Then he tells her stories of a laughing mountain of a man, tall and broad, who spun spellwork into elaborate games for their children and pulled the most astonishing pranks. Ihor loved to ski down the Western Mountains, and could best any baker in a contest. He had only been a middling apprentice sorcerer, but they had fallen in love huddling for warmth in a snow-shelter in their youth, and Vladyslav had named him Queen in defiance of his council. Luckily for the realm, he blossomed and won his first Game handily; but Vladyslav skates over that period quickly, since it meant the fall of Alina’s father. His stories are less of Ihor as Queen, and more of Ihor as man, father, and husband; full of laughter, joy, and love.

At first his stories tumble over each other, as if Vladyslav cannot speak them quickly enough; then they slow, and finally he says simply, “He was my life,” and stops.

They sit in silence, watching the progression of the sun across the sky.

Olha lands in the crater some five hours later, her spellwork winding about her like an elegant cobweb, lacy and intricate. She is no longer a shy weedy apprentice, but a resplendent sorceress, travelstained yet the most beautiful sight Alina has ever seen.

Alina realizes she hardly knows her.

Vladyslav stands, his dignity as intact as his clothing is tattered. His Game has been no easier than Alina’s.

Alina stands to witness.

“Thou art defeated,” Olha says, her voice steel.

“Remember him for me,” Vladyslav says to Alina, then turns back to Olha. “Do it.”

The King of the Western Lands falls.

Alina should feel triumphant. 

Instead she thinks of Vladyslav and Ihor. She thinks of the stories Vladyslav told, of the smile on his face when he talked of their daughter Lyubov and son Ruslan. Lyubov is a scholar, never happier than curled up by the fire with a book, and Ruslan takes after Ihor, warmhearted and beloved by all who know him. 

They are her age. Somewhere, they are grieving their fathers, as Alina has grieved hers all her life. Somewhere, Lyubov has felt the heavy weight of the Crown settle on her shoulders.

Perhaps there will be no Game with the Western Lands for a generation. Perhaps the next Game will be with the Southern Reaches, or the Northern Wastes. Perhaps she will not have to seek Lyubov’s destruction, or find herself struck down by Lyubov’s forces.

The Game never truly ends; it only pauses for a while, and resets to the beginning.

Olha is waiting at the edge of the crater, her face alight with the after-glimmer of her spellwork and with the triumphant joy of the Game’s end. Despite her transformation, Alina can still see the shyness in the long lines of her body and the way she bites her lip; she is still the girl Alina walked with in a castle garden, months and a lifetime ago.

Alina is no longer the girl who walked with her, and she finds she cannot share the triumphant joy. There are too many ghosts in that crater, and too many forfeit futures. They will go home and rebuild, and wait to begin again. Next time she will be more skilled, and the next time more skilled again; she may win many Games, and see many Kings fall. Perhaps that thought would invigorate many Kings, but it does not invigorate her. She feels only weariness, and a bone-deep sadness that almost scares her with its intensity.

She bows to the crater; silent respect to the dead of both sides, and final farewell to Nataliya.

 _It is over_ , Alina thinks, _the Game is over_ , and has to close her eyes against a sudden rush of tears. 

When she opens them again, Olha smiles tentatively at her. She has waited patiently, the picture of a blushing bride, victorious and resplendent.

She is the sorceress who struck down Vladyslav; as Nataliya struck down Ihor; as Ihor struck down Alina’s father; as Alina gave the coup de grâce to her mortally wounded soldiers who begged her for it. There is blood on all their hands.

The Game will never be over.

“Shall we go home?” Alina asks, and holds out her hand.

She is the King, and there has never been any doubt that she will do what she must.

~


End file.
